specifications. Your team will also need to help the day go well by staying on time, encouraging networking, and having a backup plan if things go wrong. Having a person documenting the event by taking pictures will be useful for post forum communication. If you are hosting an online forum, be sure to arrive early, test connections with all speakers, and set up break out groups before you start. For encouraging the return of participants after the Case Study activity, lunch break and Strategic Doing activity, create games and/or have door prizes. See Tool 3: Considerations for In-Person vs. Online Virtual Forums in the Tools section of this how-to guide. After the Forum tasks continue. We recommend two team debrief sessions including the planning committee, facilitators, and speakers. The first should be done immediately after the forum to get immediate feedback and ideas for improvement. A second debrief should be done within two weeks to allow for perspective and data analysis. Lessons learned should be captured for use in planning future forums. You will also want to reconnect with all registrants (not just those who attended) with a summary of the day, evaluation data, a thank you for their interest/attendance, summary of small group session notes, contact list and other resources to deepen understanding. If you conduct a Community Action Forum, you’ll need to allow time for actions to occur and time to check in with those responsible for the actions. You may provide follow-up assistance. And since actions take time to produce results, you will want to plan for a time to collect action and impact data. We suggest you follow up within three months. You may want to do more frequent check-ins on 30-60-90-day marks to see progress on projects and to determine if they need assistance. And to sustain action, you want to add a 6-month or more check-in time frame. Longer timeframes can help continue to mobilize participants to share actions taken, conduct ripple mapping to understand longer term impacts and continue communication with forum participants to keep them up to date on activities. We’ve even monitored actions for two -plus years to get a more complete picture of impacts.
Agenda of a Forum Using the Principles of a Successful Forum
The following agenda is an example used to illustrate how these principles are embedded into the forum design. The first column provides a sample agenda. The second column explains the “Why” this agenda item is included, and the third column answers the question “What” is Intended to Happen? - Outcomes. This reasoning connects the agenda to the Principles of Successful Forums outlined on pages 22-27. The following agenda with answers to the why and what questions is based on forums conducted in Delaware, Maryland and Ohio in 2018-2019 and 2021:
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